Children are not life’s accessories

Published on April 11, 2026April 11, 2026 by EF TeamLeave a comment

High-profile working mothers may not be the best models for young conservative women. Their attempts at juggling stressful jobs with raising children are undermining the case for motherhood.

by Sarah Wilder

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is under fire for a viral clip from an event with Turning Point USA CEO Erika Kirk. In the clip, Leavitt tells a young woman in the crowd that she should pursue both motherhood and a career because “actually being a mom and having a family and having a job, it gives you the greatest perspective.”

She goes on to say that “you can have the hardest, worst, most stressful day at your job, but when you go home to a beautiful baby and children who are just happy to see you no matter what, it is the most refreshing, beautiful thing.”

A lot of the debate over women working vs. staying home devolves into preachy pedantics from both sides regarding how much time a mother can or should work, at what age she can or should work, and what kind of work she can do. These conversations are nearly always fruitless because each woman’s circumstance is different. Many women do simply have to work to make ends meet, others are fooling themselves that their job that barely covers the nanny’s salary is necessary.

The core problem with Leavitt’s mentality isn’t just that she works an all-hours, high-stress job away from her young children. Nor is it just that she is painting an unrealistic picture of what’s “possible” as a working mother to women who are not going to land one of the most high-profile careers in comms in the country. Indeed, Leavitt could have a nanny bring her baby along for nursing sessions easily, but most working moms will have to pump alone in a bathroom while a daycare worker bottle feeds. She is definitely setting up her audience of normal women in normal careers for disappointment – but that’s not the whole issue.

Leavitt speaks about gaining “greater perspective” as a working mom than she would otherwise. Many criticized her for claiming her job offers her perspective on her motherhood, but she was actually claiming the opposite. For her, the job comes first and her children are the cute little perspectives she cuddles for a couple hours at home before bedtime. It’s a complete reversal of the natural order. For Leavitt, her children are a good thing because they are a net benefit to her career.

So rather than hand-wring over whether White House press secretary falls in the pre-approved list of acceptable jobs for mothers, let’s start with the principle: Mothers should prioritize motherhood, which looks like hands-on, bodily nurturing of her very young children. In the same way, fathers should prioritize fatherhood, which looks like protection and provision.

Once we get these priorities in order, the obsessive online debates over whether a man should change diapers or a woman can bring in an income seem tangential to the real issue. Mothers must seriously ask themselves if their jobs are becoming their identity over motherhood, and whether their career exists for the good of the children or the other way around.

by Sarah Wilder. The above article first appeared in Intellectual Takeout (Bloomington, Minnesota), and is reproduced by permission.

The feminists’ assault on the family hurts children most

Published on January 23, 2026January 23, 2026 by EF TeamLeave a comment

In the name of ‘liberation’ and ‘progressiveness’, the family has been dismantled, fathers marginalised, and children quietly reshaped to fit adult belief systems; the consequences are catastrophic.

by Melania Gill at The Conservative Woman

THERE is no such thing as a baby,’ wrote renowned paediatrician Donald Winnicott in 1942. ‘There is a baby and someone.’

His meaning was simple and profound: an infant does not and cannot exist in isolation. It is attached. In the 1960s John Bowlby’s great insight into child psychology known as ‘attachment theory’ explained why. Over the last few decades neuroscientific research has confirmed the observations his theory (of attachment, maternal deprivation and separation anxiety) were based on. A baby comes into being initially through its attachment to its mother – ideally through attuned care, emotional presence and the steady regulation of distress by either parent. This infant dependency is not a flaw to be overcome, it is the foundation of its development.

Yet it is precisely this truth that contemporary feminist ideology and thinking denies. As science has clarified and confirmed the importance of connection, social practices have moved in the opposite direction. Practices that formally cut or break this connection, from abortion to institutionalised early day-care through to family separation, have increased or been normalised in recent years. Decisions that are framed in terms of autonomy share a common feature: the deliberate severing of human dependency at its most vulnerable points.

We are living through a cultural moment that denies such dependency, sees attachment as danger, and relational need as oppression. In the name of ‘liberation’ and ‘progressiveness’, the family is dismantled, fathers marginalised, and children quietly reshaped to fit adult belief systems. What is presented as progress increasingly resembles something else: a refusal to accept the basic conditions under which human beings develop at all. The casualties from this are not abstract. They are children.

Decades of developmental neuroscience show that the human brain is shaped through early emotional relationships. The neuroscientist Allan Schore’s work demonstrates that the systems responsible for emotional regulation, empathy, stress tolerance and social understanding develop in direct response to the quality of caregiving. Brain development is not merely biological; it is relational.

When caregiving is emotionally attuned, a coherent sense of ‘self’ forms. The child learns that feelings can be experienced without catastrophe, that relationships survive disagreement and that dependence does not mean annihilation. When caregiving is mis-attuned, when parenting is driven by unresolved anger, trauma, grievance or rigid belief, particularly in cases involving parental alienation, something else happens. Children learn which emotions are safe and which are dangerous. They learn which parent must be protected and when, which feelings must be hidden and which version of reality is safest to adopt. Over time, the child’s inner life thins. They stop discovering who they are and start performing who they need to be. Across nearly 20 years of family assessment, I have repeatedly seen this occurring even when there is no overt cruelty. Often it is quiet: originating in a parent who can’t tolerate ambivalence or who requires their child to mirror their emotional reality.

Unresolved anger and distress from childhood relational harm is rarely expressed directly; rather it’s projected outward on to those whom cultural narratives have already positioned as dangerous or blameworthy – men or fathers, for example. In present ideological climates, they frequently serve this function. The child becomes the carrier of this projected anger. What looks like confidence or moral clarity is, in reality, fear held rigidly in place.

Such children can speak with striking certainty about adult matters they cannot possibly understand. They repeat slogans rather than thoughts, show contempt where curiosity should be, and appear strong while lacking emotional depth. What looks like independence is a self that has had to harden too early; a fundamental and unconscious lack of trust in all relationships.

Underlying this is a failure of early emotional attunement. When children are not accurately seen, soothed, or mirrored by primary caregivers, the brain systems responsible for emotional regulation and identity integration do not fully mature (Schore, 2015; Fonagy et al, 2002).

The result is chronic, often unrecognised anger and emotional instability. During adolescence, these vulnerabilities may manifest as identity confusion, distorted memory, intolerance of dissent, and defensive self-enhancement (Erikson, 1968; Kernberg, 1975). The thousands of reality-based professionals working on family law cases across the world witness this time and again in depressingly increasing numbers.

Dependency is not weakness; it is the engine of development. Children become independent through relationship and connection, not in defiance of them. Yet much contemporary ideology rests on the opposite premise: that needing others is oppression, that attachment is danger, and that autonomy demands severance. Here, radical feminism reveals its deepest psychological error. By reframing attachment as a flawed concept and dependency as harm, it renders parental care, especially paternal care, suspect. Fathers become optional, even inherently dangerous. It creates a ‘case’ for chopping off half of a child’s relational world. By prioritising adult identity claims over children’s developmental needs, it inverts the moral order and takes over culture.

Unsurprisingly, societies that celebrate this model now face collapsing birth rates, rising loneliness and escalating psychological distress. Extinction-level fertility is not only an economic warning; it’s a psychological one. It signals a culture that has lost faith in continuity and is heading for oblivion.

It’s impossible to ignore that this same distorted psychological ‘logic’ underpins both radical feminism and contemporary transgender ideology, despite their surface-level conflicts. At their core, both reject biological givens, evolutionary continuity, and developmental constraint in favour of self-definition unconstrained by body, relationship or reproduction. When realities are treated as oppressive rather than formative, identity becomes unmoored. This creates fertile ground for narcissistic adaptation.

For children and adolescents already struggling with mis-attuned parenting or fragile identity formation, ideologies that promise absolute self-definition offer powerful relief. The projection of unresolved childhood attachment anger becomes a demand for justice. Self-righteous certainty replaces curiosity. Any challenge is reframed as harm and aggressively denied using howling moral outrage and ‘cancellation’ of those who disagree.

From a developmental perspective, this is profoundly anti-evolutionary and truly dystopian. A society that denies sex, embodiment, reproduction and dependency is not merely redefining identity, it is splitting itself from continuity. The result is fragility: identities that cannot tolerate disagreement and relationships that cannot survive difference. And there is a chilling historical parallel.

What we see now is not biological eugenics, but a cultural analogue: deciding which family bonds are expendable, which parents are suspect, and which children must adapt to ideologically curated environments.

Fatherhood becomes a developmental risk by presumption. Children are expected to reorganise themselves accordingly. They call it liberation; ‘back in the real world’ we know it as catastrophic damage to families and children on an industrial scale.

History shows that systems convinced of their moral superiority struggle to see the harm they produce. Once children become symbols rather than developing minds, the line between safeguarding and social engineering disappears. The appalling outcomes are being and will be written into the psychology of the next generation. When a culture teaches its children that they need no one, it should not be surprised when they grow up unable to love, trust, or carry the future they were meant to inherit.

The family is not a patriarchal relic. It is the primary psychological infrastructure of all societies. Undermine it, and everything downstream weakens. Winnicott was right: there is no such thing as a baby alone, a child, or in fact anyone. And there is no such thing as a society that survives the denial of dependency.

By Melanie Gill. This article first appeared at The Conservative Woman and is republished here with permission.

Melanie Gill is a UK-based attachment specialist, psychologist and forensic consultant, working as an expert witness in complex family proceedings for nearly two decades. Despite an ongoing feminist-inspired campaign to ‘cancel’ her from her family court work she continues to campaign for children and families and remains passionate about bringing psychological science and knowledge into policy and family law.

The Conservative Woman is one of Britain’s fastest-growing websites and is committed to explaining and promoting the virtues of people’s instinctive social conservatism and its importance for children’s wellbeing.

The Joy of Being the “Default Parent”

Published on January 14, 2026January 15, 2026 by EF TeamLeave a comment

The “default parent” is the one who carries the so-called “invisible load” of administrative tasks related to the children, but more significantly, she bears the emotional tasks of raising children.

Author and mother Gina Bontempo noted on X recently that the online uproar over a woman being the “default parent” in her child’s life smacks of the lie that men and women can, and should, be treated as interchangeable.

For those unfamiliar with internet lingo, the phenomenon in question is as old as mothers and fathers themselves, extending beyond internet scuffles. The “default parent” is the one who carries the so-called “invisible load” of administrative tasks related to the children (doctor’s appointments, school events, family vacations). But more significantly, she bears the emotional tasks of raising children. Mothers will often complain that their sleep-deprived or sick or developmentally fragile children will flock to them even when the mothers are burned out, while their husbands stand unencumbered and unneeded right beside them.

It’s not that this isn’t true of most parent-child relationships, but that mothers need to make peace with what is both natural and, truly, a brief blessing. Children’s natural preference for their mother is a biological reality. There’s no use in fostering resentment towards either your husband or your needy children about it.

“Obviously Mom is the one that babies need and want most when they’re hungry or tired or in pain,” Bontempo wrote. “To pretend otherwise is to pretend like men and women, fathers and mothers are interchangeable. We aren’t. The feminist-coded mothers on social media complaining about the stress of always being the ‘default parent’ live in a fantasy world where moms and dads are exactly the same, perfectly equal and switchable when it comes to young children. Very dysfunctional thinking.”

The very phrase “default parent” is the type of genderless word-slop that arises from a society that views differences between men and women as symptoms of systemic prejudice, even when these differences are inherent and natural.

Rather, the “default parent” has the joy of being, albeit temporarily, her child’s almost sole source of comfort and rest. The mother has the immense privilege of satisfying all of her child’s needs in the first year or so of his or her life.

Indeed, few talk about what must be the frustrations of the parent who is not “default.” My toddler son is already starting to flip the script and as a mother I have been able to see how hard it can be to be the person your child does not primarily want for comfort.

To be your child’s “default,” to be recognized as his primary source of comfort and even nourishment is a blessing that the moms of TikTok would do well to enjoy before it ends.

by Sarah Wilder. The above article first appeared in Intellectual Takeout (Bloomington, Minnesota), and is reproduced by permission.

Nordic governments most radical at UN

Published on January 6, 2026January 6, 2026 by EF TeamLeave a comment

When it comes to the sexual revolution, the Nordic governments continue to show they are among the most radical in the world. This was borne out again at the most recent session of the Universal Periodic Review, where governments review each other’s human rights records.

The Nordics continued to pressure other governments on abortion, gender ideology, and extreme sex-ed. In the most recent session of the UPR, where thirteen countries were reviewed, there were 35 instances where governments were pressured to liberalize their abortion laws. Twelve of them came from Nordic governments, which include Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden—but predominantly Iceland. Iceland generates by far the most abortion pressure out of all 193 UN member states at the UPR—around 20 percent of the total in the last completed review cycle.

The Nordic countries called for abortion to be legalized, decriminalized, and made more accessible, including by limiting the right of conscientious objection by health care providers.

On the issues of sexual orientation and gender identity, the governments under review were pressured 160 times, 33 of which were from Iceland (close to 20 percent). These recommendations included urging the Marshall Islands to legalize same-sex marriage and “introduce a transparent administrative self-identification process for legal gender recognition free from intrusive requirements.” Iceland and Norway urged several countries to decriminalize same-sex sexual behavior and enact comprehensive anti-discrimination legislation that included sexual orientation and gender identity as protected categories.

Iceland also recommended that Liberia, Malawi, Mongolia, and Panama guarantee that comprehensive sexuality education be provided, both in and out of school settings.

Nordic countries are among the top funders of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and UN Women, which in turn promote SRHR in developing countries where they work. This is despite the fact that the UN General Assembly has never accepted the SRHR terminology—despite decades of repeated efforts by the Nordics and their allies.

Unlike the U.S., which is a bigger donor but undergoes significant shifts in its foreign policy depending on which party controls Congress and the White House, the Nordic countries have maintained consistent political and financial support for SRHR over time. This has included Sweden’s launch of the first explicitly feminist foreign policy in 2014, a 2020 statement from Nordic prime ministers opposing any restrictions on abortion, and a 2024 joint statement from Nordic gender ministers in support of LGBTI rights.

In addition to their funding for UN agencies earmarked for promoting SRHR, Nordic countries also strategically fund activist groups within developing countries, particularly where social norms remain largely pro-life and pro-family. In 2014, the Queen of Denmark announced a new funding mechanism called Amplify Change, which supports “grassroots movements for SRHR.” It has provided grants for groups promoting abortion, “sex work,” comprehensive sexuality education, and reducing stigma around LGBT issues.

Despite continued Nordic investment in international SRHR, Sweden decided in 2022 to abandon the explicitly “feminist” framing of its foreign policy after a right-wing bloc won in a general election. This year, Norway’s left-wing government narrowly held on to power despite gains on the right. However, while populist parties make gains in the Nordic region, often motivated by mass immigration, it remains to be seen whether this will translate into a rightward movement on social issues in their foreign policy.

By Rebecca Oas. C-FAM: The Centre for Family & Human Rights was founded in the summer of 1997 in order to monitor and affect the social policy debate at the United Nations and other international institutions. C-Fam is a non-partisan, non-profit research institute dedicated to reestablishing a proper understanding of international law, protecting national sovereignty and the dignity of the human person.

Gen Z, social media, and envy

Published on November 18, 2025November 24, 2025 by EF TeamLeave a comment

Social media causes desensitisation to things that should disturb us and hypersensitivity to things that should not disturb us. It afflicts Gen Z with a toxic culture of envy.

My generation, Gen Z (born between 1996 and 2010), finds itself in the throes of individual depression, pessimism about the future, and a strong tendency not to take personal responsibility. As a 20-year-old college student, I have witnessed this firsthand. I believe much of the problem can be traced to social media and its creation of a make-believe world, a world defined by pronounced social envy.

Only 39 percent of Generation Z aged 18-29 believe that achieving the American dream is still possible, while 60 percent do not.¹ It is disheartening, to say the least, that a large majority of our youth do not believe in the American tradition of achieving success through hard work and determination.

Gen Z has grown up in a different world from previous generations—an online world, one that immerses them in fantasy. Fantasy leads inevitably to disappointment as this made-up online world creates unrealistic expectations for the real world.

Abundant research shows that social media is harmful to youth. Social media use is correlated with rising instances of self-harm and suicidality in boys and girls.² At the same time, American girls use social media far more than boys.³ While boys are off playing video games or consuming online porn, girls succumb to toxic self-comparison at a time when they are most confused about their identity. This allows them to be taken advantage of by predators, by influencers espousing extreme ideology, and by other women who tell them to prioritise themselves above all others.

The results of this gender gap are ominous for the future of America. More young men than young women report wanting to have children.⁴ At a time when America’s birth rate continues to plummet below replacement, Gen Z is dropping the ball on family formation. It is not just apathy towards having a family. Gen Z is growing more anti-capitalist, more anti-natalist and more callous about the deaths of others. Reactions on social media in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s horrific assassination come to mind.

Social media causes desensitization to things that should disturb us and hypersensitivity to things that should not disturb us. It afflicts Gen Z with a toxic culture of envy.

The inside view

Generation Z’s ailments are clear from the outside, but even more so from the inside. It is important to note that the author is a member of Gen Z himself, born just a few years after the turn of the millennium. I have been spared the despair of my generation because of my family.

Raised in a large family with close bonds with my siblings, I was never alone in the sense that many Gen Zers report themselves feeling. My parents ran a household that was strong in moral teachings and founded upon family values. Furthermore, my parents had the foresight to withhold social media from my siblings and me far longer than most of our generation. We were not subject to the culture of envy that we watched our friends endure. I made it all the way to my 19th birthday before I became curious, suspecting that social media might prove useful or practical as an adult in college.

I deleted all my accounts in less than a year. My experience on social media was far from anything I had expected. Perhaps I was naive to expect pictures of pleasant scenery and the occasional post about a family trip. But I could not have foreseen the extent to which social media is riddled with depravity, dishonesty and delusion. What I saw as an outsider to my own generation made plain precisely why my close friends and peers seemed so distant and anxious. It was clear why they had lost faith in themselves, their communities and the American dream.

The reason social media has had such a horrendous effect on American youth is that, fundamentally, social media is not what it seems. The photos and videos that are posted online are often edited into an unrecognizable version of the truth. What is presented as a casual selfie is often an hours-long commitment that requires professional equipment, painstaking attention to detail and constant revision. Instead of honest photos, our youth sees perfection. But it is perfection presented as something attainable. Or rather, something that seems attainable, but isn’t attainable in reality. This is the root of Gen Z’s envy.

Incessant comparison

Social media’s inherent culture of envy is bad enough. But what makes it particularly dangerous to Gen Z is that members of my generation are obsessed with comparing themselves to their peers. Gen Zers average about nine hours of screen time every day.⁵ It is not unusual to have a screen time of 10 or even 14 hours a day. Some of my friends can spend 20 hours a day looking at screens.

Social media takes up a significant amount of these appalling screen times. Sixty percent of Gen Z spends at least four hours a day on social media, and 22 percent report spending seven or more hours a day.⁶ Time spent on social media is time not spent socializing, working, exercising, reading, spending time with family, and more. Rather than engage with the real world as much as possible, a sizable majority of Generation Z spends the greater part of their day in an online fantasy.

Living in the fictional world of social media is a major cause of Gen Z’s pessimism, and Gen Z’s members know it. About 83 percent of America’s youth have tried to limit their social media use, albeit largely unsuccessfully.⁷ Gen Z recognizes the harms of social media as a group. But while 48 percent of teenagers agree that social media is harmful to people their age, just 14 percent believe that social media affects them personally.⁸

What these statistics reveal is an element of denial. The youth culture’s expectation of perfection requires hiding imperfections. But upon a closer look, it becomes clear that this perfectionism is a symptom of envy. The desire to be as affluent, powerful, attractive and popular as influencers on social media comes from spending too much time in the online world. Carefully curated posts that are funneled to the right audiences create an infinite network of nested mini-worlds in which our youth have become lost. The resulting lack of direction is part of why Gen Z feels so pessimistic. Generation Z’s pessimism expresses itself in many ways: class resentment, hetero-pessimism, apathy and sensitivity.

Class resentment is the byproduct of economic forces on social media. Online sites kick consumer culture into hyperdrive. It begins with extravagant displays of wealth. Influencers who advertise perfect dress, flawless appearance, ideal travel experiences, luxurious homes and fine dining inevitably attract viewers for the simple reason that wealth is desirable. Considering that Gen Z is significantly more dissatisfied with their economic situation than other generations, it is no surprise that young people are drawn toward such content in large numbers.⁹ Much of Generation Z sees what they want but cannot have, for hours at a time each day.

Displays of unrealistic wealth

Individual envy is then amplified into pessimism. Social media algorithms recommend to users what they are most likely to click on. The more outraged users are, the more likely they are to become even more outraged and to be connected to other users who reinforce their indignation. Since Gen Z is uniquely susceptible to economic pessimism, they are at a greater risk of falling victim to this outrage. As time passes, young social media users fall farther down the rabbit hole, becoming more radicalised and more pessimistic.

The consequence is a strong current of anticapitalism and economic pessimism that views the American system as fundamentally unfair. And so long as they remain isolated in their online echo chambers, my peers will continue to be overexposed to the shortcomings of American capitalism and underexposed to its many benefits.

The hyper-individualization of Gen Z encouraged by social media applies to dating and family dynamics as well as economic concerns. Just as algorithms radicalize the youth into anticapitalism, they do the same for hyperfeminism.

Recent surveys continue to show that young women are ranking their career and individual interests ahead of starting a family.¹⁰ This is unsurprising given the prominence of anti-male trends on social media. As of late, a proliferation of social media posts with the hashtag childfree suggests that childlessness as an identity is growing.

There are also movements encouraging women to become “boysober” and swear off all emotional and physical relationships with men.¹¹ Some women online are using the term “mankeeping,” which is primarily used to complain about the burdens of supporting their partners through hard times. Popularized in 2016, the MenAreTrash movement swept social media platforms and gained rapid popularity for disparaging men and heterosexual dating in any way possible.

Toxic feminism

The online environment culminates in a general pessimism about dating and family called “hetero-pessimism.” Originally coined in 2019, hetero-pessimism refers to a movement where women are ashamed of being straight and view “heterosexuality as a prison within which they are confined against their will.”¹² Gen Z women are especially vulnerable to trends like hetero-pessimism.

Again, considering the radicalising nature of social media algorithms, it is easy for girls to fall for ideas that promote individualism and the prioritisation of self over pair-bonding or community. As a result, teenage girls sometimes enter the dating scene with unrealistic expectations because of exposure to fake relationships on social media. Young men who encounter such women are then treated to a rude awakening where they are expected to act as an accessory to a woman who is more interested in superficial pleasures and material wealth than true partnership.

It is worth pausing to emphasize that this is a somewhat extreme characterization of a complex phenomenon. Not all young women who use social media are anti-male. Yet, anti-male sentiment weaves itself into social media in various ways.

More widespread than hetero-pessimism is the creation of echo chambers by social media algorithms that amplify and radicalise opinions and perspectives.

Consider the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk. In the era before social media, it may be true that the victim of such a horrific and violent act would have received near total sympathy from the American public, including its youth. Regardless of whether this was the case in the past, it is certainly not true now.

Apathy—and in some cases jubilation—from the left over the murder of Charlie Kirk is not originally because of inherent cold-heartedness and cruelty. It is because of desensitisation. This is an important distinction. Desensitisation by social media is what leads to coldheartedness and cruelty when left unchecked. Such apathetic and jubilant individuals did not express sympathy because that is not what they were shown. Social media algorithms likely predicted that such viewers, especially some progressive youth, would not have clicked on such content. Instead, they were fed increasingly extreme posts that dismissed or mocked the death of Charlie Kirk. And in viewing such posts, their views were validated and radicalised instead of moderated.

The condoning of Kirk’s assassination that spread across the internet is emblematic of a growing apathy towards the plight of persons outside each individual’s social media bubble. Within these anonymous echo chambers, algorithms supercharge this apathy into a callous joy that is not just inappropriate, but dangerous.

The tyranny of online policing

Online policing of political correctness reached a fever pitch during the Covid-19 pandemic, when American society was as far from the real world as it had ever been. This had a detrimental effect on Generation Z, given that they came of age around the use of chosen pronouns, progressive terminology like “safe spaces,” and leftist ideology that accused most social and economic institutions of being inherently bad. So rather than work to develop empathy for those different from them, Generation Z was immersed in a ruthless online culture that focused on the faults of those who were different from them, instead of what we have in common as Americans.

Generation Z is steeped in a fabricated version of reality that amplifies outrage, promotes individualism and heightens our differences. The culture of envy engendered by social media has made our youth so pessimistic that many of them no longer believe in the American dream. Who can blame them? Because of social media, much of Gen Z is entering adulthood unchallenged, un-self-aware, and unable to see that they are part of something greater than themselves.

As a member of Gen Z, I place my hope in those of us who are strong enough to stop looking at our screens and start looking at all that is happening around us. For when we do so, we begin to see that the beauty of reality is far more rewarding than any online illusions of perfection.

This article is published by the Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation in St Louis, Missouri, USA. The original article is available from the foundation’s website: www.mindszenty.org. The Mindszenty Report is not copyrighted, and readers are invited to forward copies to their local bishops, priests and pastors.

Where all the men have gone – and how to bring them back

Published on July 10, 2025July 10, 2025 by EF Team2 Comments

A concerted effort is needed to undo the harms wrought by feminism on men, particularly the damage caused by the promotion of the concept of ‘toxic masculinity.’

In a recent “New York Times” article titled, “Men, Where Have You Gone? Please Come Back,” Rachel Drucker laments what she calls “a collective shift” in men, a “slow vanishing of presence.” So many single men, she writes, aren’t “sitting across from someone on a Saturday night, trying to connect.” Instead, they “have retreated from intimacy, hiding behind firewalls, filters and curated personas, dabbling and scrolling.” She adds, “We miss you.”

Drucker – a single, 54-year-old Chicagoan – hints that pornography is at least partly to blame. She mentions that she herself spent years working as the custodian of records for Playboy and its affiliated hardcore properties, working closely with marketing teams to understand “what cues tempt the average 18-to-36-year-old cis heterosexual man. What drew him in. What kept him coming back.” She learned that it wasn’t intimacy or mutuality, but “access to simulation.”

Now many men, she believes, have “quietly withdrawn from intimacy and vulnerability” into “indifference.” The sexes have moved, she observes, into an era when traditional courting has devolved into “directionless orbiting,” “men circling intimacy but never entering it… ‘seeing where it goes’ without ever going anywhere.” She even mourns the “unscripted contact” of one-night stands.

“You can still come back,” she pleads with men. “We’re still here, those of us who are willing to cocreate something true… And we haven’t stopped hoping.”

The male retreat from the courting dance of days past is a tragedy but so is Drucker’s obliviousness to the reasons for it. Yes, pornography is a huge factor; the ubiquitous availability of the most explicit imagery imaginable (and even unimaginable) to anyone with an internet connection is a terrible scourge in our society – and not only for males, but for girls as well, in a variety of ways.

But the broader explanation for the intimacy wasteland Drucker describes is more than a half century of radical feminism and its ruthless war on masculinity, femininity, and the nuclear family. She is finally noticing, but apparently not understanding, the blasted landscape left by the Sexual Revolution’s tornado of destruction since the 1960s and ‘70s that pushed aside old-fashioned courtship and sex roles in its self-indulgent wake.

If men have retreated from those traditional roles and social practices, it is because the culture has been weaponized against men – disrespecting, devaluing, and even demonizing generations of them as “toxic.” Feminist thought leaders, with the complicity of many opportunistic male feminists, railed against the chimeras of “patriarchy” and “rape culture.” They demanded that men deconstruct their masculine nature to be more like, well, stereotypical women: vulnerable, emotional, and deferential to the opposite sex. They marginalized men as literally unnecessary, celebrating females as capable, courageous, girlbosses who can and should do everything men can do. Anything less is seen as diminishing female capabilities and value. Meanwhile men are failing by almost every social metric, from education to the workplace.

Another factor is that the notorious and often cruel bias of family law against husbands and fathers has driven many men to see marriage as grossly inequitable and undesirable. Boys and young men have watched their fathers destroyed in family court, reduced to the indentured slavery of permanent alimony. They are now rethinking what they see as a no-win conventional lifestyle of marriage and family. Why volunteer to doom yourself, they ask themselves, to a system designed to bleed men dry of their money, health, and ambitions?

In recent years a backlash has begun swinging hard against the ravages of feminism, unfortunately driving millions of young men into the embrace of such online influencers as former kickboxer Andrew Tate. Tate flaunts a cartoonish vision of masculinity centered on flashy materialism and the violent domination and sexual exploitation of women. This backlash also includes an entire subculture called MGTOWs – Men Going Their Own Way – by swearing off long-term relationships with women, whom they see as nothing more than greedy vampires who drain one husband, then trade up to a wealthier one.

In sum, feminism promised to liberate women from what Karl Marx called the “slavery” of motherhood and marriage by pushing them into competition with men, and the Sexual Revolution granted them the freedom to indulge their sexual appetites as promiscuously as any man. The consequence has been a family-destroying disordering of society at home, in the workplace, and between the sexes. So now, women like Drucker, who worked in the porn industry and who confesses to many relationships including one-night stands, are left wondering why so many men have chosen to disengage, to guard themselves emotionally, financially, and physically behind a variety of walls.

If women want men to return so that both can get off the sterile treadmill of dating apps and one-night stands, resuming the imperfect but genuine human dynamic of romance, it will happen only if the failed social experiments of the past are rolled back. This will require a concerted, grass-roots, long march through the institutions of the culture – from education to the news media to the entertainment industry – to undo the ruinous narratives that have brought us to this point.

We must stop smearing traditional masculinity as toxic and oppressive, and quit devaluing traditional femininity as demeaning and imprisoning. We must cease pitting the sexes against each other and reclaim a culture that honors and celebrates their complementary nature. The decades-long push to eradicate any differences between masculinity and femininity, to blur even their very definitions, has wrought nothing but misery, confusion, and resentment, and must be abandoned.

Sometimes societal progress can be made only by acknowledging we have taken a clearly destructive path, retracing our steps to where we first lost our way. It’s the only hope for men and women to – as Drucker put it with such yearning – cocreate something true.

By Mark Tapson

The above article first appeared in Intellectual Takeout (Bloomington, Minnesota), and is reproduced by permission.